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Lemonade Stand and the Apple revolution

Garry Barker revists a simple game which came bundled with the
original Apple II computer.

A screen grab from Lemonade Stand.

ANYONE prepared to risk being denounced by generation Y cynics
as a wrinklie (or even a crumbly) might now admit to having been
charmed in their youth by a sweet little Apple computer game called
Lemonade Stand. It was introduced in 1979 and came bundled with
every Apple II computer, thus pre-dating the Mac by half a
decade.

Lemonade Stand now looks terribly pedestrian beside
run-of-the-modern-monitor games such as Warcraft or Grand Theft
Auto. This says a lot about how far computer technology has
advanced over the past 30 years. It might also say something about
how the expectations and the habits of our society have been
changed by technology; maybe not always for the better.

You did not, for instance, use a death ray-spouting,
chainsaw-bayoneted, super-blaster to smash down your opponent;
pretty standard stuff in computer combat these days. All Lemonade
Stand did was teach some basic rules of retailing and the only
things that got killed were your sales when the computer ruled that
a blizzard just hit your lemonade stand.

Part of the Christmas celebrations of the Melbourne Macintosh
User Group (iMUG) this month was a demonstration of Lemonade Stand
running, not on an Apple II, although one of them rests in the
Melbourne Museum's collection, but on an Intel-powered MacBook
Pro.

Ian Godfrey, who ran the iMUG demonstration, says Lemonade Stand
and the Apple II were the seeds from which he and his partner Lecki
Ord ultimately grew GO-Strategies, a Melbourne-based firm
specialising in strategic planning and economic modelling mainly
for government projects. They still use Apple computers, today the
latest Macs.

Godfrey says he remains amazed that his partners in Sweetnam,
Godfrey and Ord, the architecture consultancy in which they then
worked, went along with buying an Apple II back when they really
did not know what they might do with it.

There was almost no software, the world wide web had not been
invented, broadband was a figment of a boffin's imagination, and
computers were not the ubiquitous appliances they are today.

"But somehow we understood that this machine represented a great
paradigm shift; that it signified something huge," he said.

"Then towards the end of 1979 we got VisiCalc for the Apple II,
the first shrink-wrapped software, and suddenly we were in this
amazing new world where you could do 'what ifs' and write routines,
and suddenly we saw the future."

Back in 1979, the list price of a 48K Apple II in Australia was
$5840, but Godfrey had a Canadian friend who drove to Niagara Falls
in the US to buy one for $4816, including shipping. "It was a huge
purchase, equivalent in today's currency to $28,700," he says.

At the museum, Godfrey ran an original version of Lemonade
Stand, using Virtual II and an emulation of an on-board Apple II
ROM, but there are also simulations of the original game to be
found by Googling "LemonadeStand".

Godfrey says the Apple II signified a great shift in the world
and Lemonade Stand was part of it. "I think the iPhone is bringing
change of a similar order." Mobility - being always connected to
everywhere - and the applications that are being made to run on the
iPhone will do that.

He talks of Stanford University music professor Ge Wang, who
built the application that turns an iPhone into an ocarina, an
ancient flute. You activate the notes by blowing across the
iPhone's mic and opening or closing the "holes" by tapping buttons
on the screen.

"He made $400,000 in the first month," Godfrey says. "People
just went crazy for it." YouTube is now full of clips of ocarina
players and "orchestras". Smule Ocarina costs $1.19 from the iTunes
App Store.

macfile

TALK of Lemonade and early Apple computers reminds us that the
Melbourne Museum has a good collection of Apple technology,
possibly one of the most representative outside the US. It spans
the history of Apple, from a replica of the first Apple computer
built by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs when they were teenagers
through to the Apple II, the first Macs and early portables (better
known as "luggables") to iMacs and iPods.

The collection, under the care of curator David Dimant, also
includes CSIRAC, the last intact first-generation computer left in
the world. It was Australia's first mainframe computer and only the
fourth of its kind to be built in the world. At a pinch you might
say it has a very distant relationship to iTunes, if only because
CSIRAC was the first computer to play digital music.

Mr Dimant also showed iMUG members some much earlier digital
items, including an early calculator and a "digital" music box made
in Switzerland in 1860, and an 1851 letter from Samuel Morse (of
Morse code fame) sent to his protege, Samuel McGowan, who in 1854
built the first Australian telegraph line, running from Melbourne
to Williamstown.

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